Cowbridge Accommodation

More About Cowbridge

Walk the high street and find the medieval South Gate and the surviving stretch of town wall behind it. Give an hour to the Physic Garden, a walled garden restored and open behind the main street. Then get out into the Vale: the Heritage Coast is fifteen minutes south, with the cliffs at Nash Point and the beach at Ogmore.

What Cowbridge really offers is proximity without the city. Cardiff is twenty minutes east and Bridgend fifteen west, so you can be at the Principality Stadium or on an empty clifftop within half an hour of the same front door. The Brecon Beacons are an hour north.

The Romans built here first, on the road between the forts at Cardiff and Neath. It was a settlement substantial enough that excavation keeps turning it up under the shops, and some think it is the place the Romans called Bomium.

The town proper is Norman. Richard de Clare, lord of Glamorgan, gave Cowbridge its borough charter in 1254. His son Gilbert had walls put round it about twelve years later, with four gates in them.

That makes it one of the very few walled towns in Wales, and unusually a good stretch of the wall and the whole South Gate are still standing. The single long high street is the medieval plan, unchanged.

What has changed is what is sold along it. Along it are a butcher, a fishmonger, a bookshop and two delis. There is a long row of small shops that are not chains, which is rarer on a high street than it sounds. Saturday morning is when the stalls go up behind Arthur John’s on the high street.

The Physic Garden is behind the old grammar school on Church Street, inside the medieval walls, planted the way an eighteenth-century garden would have been and free to walk into.